Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Northstar picked up another 8 inches yesterday as the storm rotated across the Tahoe basin. That brough the storm total to 10 inches. The March total is already up to 31 inches with more snow in the forecast this weekend and maybe a lot more snow next week.

Low pressure is going to setup in the Northeast Pacific by Saturday and will send the jestream underneath into the Pacific NW this weekend. Several waves will come onshore starting Saturday. The first one will stay to our North but the second for Sunday is trending further South and could bring several inches Sunday into Monday.

Then as another low sets up in the Northeast Pacific a strong jetstream aims a hose of moisture at Northern CA. Some of the forecast models show a SW to NE oriented jet sitting over Northern CA which could dump tons of rain on Northern CA to our Northwest. Other models have a more W to E oriented jet pointed right at Tahoe with continues waves of moisture through the week.

The GFS model for instance shows the moisture staying to our Northwest until Thursday/Friday as the jetstream finally pushes further South from another low pushing into the NE Pacific. That brings over 8 inches of rain to the NW corner of CA and then several inches or more to Tahoe Thursday/Friday. The Euro on the other hand has wave after wave of moisture starting Sunday and lasting right through Friday with enough moisture for over 5 feet of snow by Friday.

In the overall pattern in the Northern hemisphere a difference in the placement of the jet of a couple hundred miles is nothing. Tomorrow is 5 days out where the forecast models usually start to come into better agreement on a solution. We will also be in range of more of the short-range models to see what they think. The potential is there for the biggest snow week of the season, but we need a lot more of the forecast models to agree first.

Either way I'm pretty confident we will see a couple snow events next week even if they are small/moderate sized. BA